CONKLING AND FOLGER-1867-1868 147 



I was also asked by the poet Longfellow to pass a day 

 with him at his beautiful Nahant cottage in order to dis- 

 cuss certain candidates and methods in literature. No- 

 thing could be more delightful than his talk as we sat 

 together on the veranda looking out over the sea, with the 

 gilded dome of the State House, which he pointed out to 

 me as "The Hub/' in the dim distance. One question of 

 his amused me much. We were discussing certain recent 

 events in which Mr. Horace Greeley had played an im- 

 portant part, and after alludingjp Mr. Greeley 's course 

 during the^War, he turned his eyes fully but mildly 

 upon me and said slowly and solemnly: "Mr. White, don't 

 you think Mr. Greeley a very jiseless sort of man ! ' ' The 

 question struck me at first as exceedingly comical ; for, I 

 thought, "Imagine Mr. Greeley, who thinks himself, and 

 with reason, a useful man if there ever was one, and whose 

 whole life has been devoted to what he has thought of the 

 highest and most direct use to his fellow-men, hearing this 

 question put in a dreamy way by a poet, a writer of 

 verse, probably the last man in America whom Mr. 

 Greeley would consider ' useful. ' ' But my old admiration 

 for the great editor came back in a strong tide, and if I 

 was ever eloquent it was in showing Mr. Longfellow how 

 great, how real, how sincere, and in the highest degree 

 how useful Mr. Greeley had been. 



Another man of note whom I met in those days was 

 Judge Eockwood Hoar, afterward named by General 

 Grant Attorney-General of the United States, noted as a 

 profound lawyer of pungent wit and charming humor, the 

 delight of his friends and the terror of his enemies. I 

 saw him first at Harvard during a competition for the 

 Boylston prize at which we were fellow-judges. All the 

 speaking was good, some of it admirable; but the espe- 

 cially remarkable pieces were two. First of these was a 

 recital of Washington Irving 's "Broken Heart," by an 

 undergraduate from the British provinces, Robert Alder 

 McLeod. Nothing could be more simple and perfect in its 

 way; nothing more free from any effort at orating; all 



